Friday Favorites: Prenatal Pilates + Giveaway Winner Announced

I am So happy to announce the winner of the FridaBaby give away. It makes me smile to give someone else such a wonderful product. Congratulations, Julie Blom! I hope you enjoy every snot-sucking, butt washing moment; and please, please, report back!

A bit of exercise is next up on my list of favorites. I don't pretend to be an expert in fitness and although I do know the benefits of staying physically active, I must say it is still a struggle to find the time to devote to movement. I think this is one of the reasons why I love 10 Minutes Solutions: Prenatal Pilates so much.

There are many wonderful in-person prenatal yoga classes on my list of favorites (more on those later!), but during my pregnancies, time and money were always a factor, so to have something to go to right at home took away one more excuse I could rely on.

So what's up with movement during pregnancy and why is it so important? There are many reasons I'm sure, but a few that come to mind are:

1. Optimal Fetal Positioning-- exercise and stretching along with other things like bodywork during pregnancy can help give baby the space he needs to be in optimal positioning for birth. A baby in good position usually leads to a smoother labor and delivery.

2. Helping the body to process sugar -- regular exercise can help lower blood sugar by helping the body to break down glucose and control insulin levels. This is especially important with the growing number of women who are diagnosed with Gestational Diabetes.

3. Strength-- staying healthy and strong during the pregnancy will assist in giving the body what it needs to endure the very physical task of childbirth.

Why do I love 10 Minute Solutions: Prenatal Pilates? In this DVD, instructor Lizbeth Garcia breaks down a 50 minutes workout into 10 minutes segments. It can be played in full or individual workouts can be selected. What does this mean? No excuses! There's pretty much always ten minutes in a day for a bit of movement! I also liked the fact that each 10 minute workout is broken up into a target areas. That way, if I happened to do a lot of walking on one particular day, I could turn on the "upper body" segment and work on just that area to add to what I had already done.

Because this DVD has a prenatal focus, I could be sure that the exercises I were doing were safe for me in all trimesters and I knew that I was being instructed to stretch and move areas that would serve me in labor and delivery. For instance in one of the segments, Lizbeth focuses a ton on pelvic tilts. I could literally feel the baby shifting and changing in ways that he needed to while giving him the space he needed to do that! Pretty incredible.

Last but not least-- the 10 minute exercises were the perfect length for working out around a toddler. There weren't many times where I had more than 10 minutes to myself. But five, 10 minute moments throughout the day would buy me an entire workout!

Movement is so important during pregnancy-- and really, there's not much that can take the place of in-person instruction-- but Lizbeth Garcia comes close in her 10 Minute Solutions: Prenatal Pilates DVD!